“But from the perspective of a coherent story in a coherent world, ignoring the success in terms of sales, it was cobbled together without a plan, and it shows. It wasn’t until maybe order of the phoenix that she had a plan for how the story would end, and she had to do a lot of hand waving to make it happen.”

“But she wasn’t a good writer. She was mid tier at best. So the eventual success of the series got beyond her abilities. While the last book was much better overall than the first few, it still relied on shoddy world building”

Excellent explanation. The first HP book is excellent. It really sucks you in. After book 4, the quality declines and they become slogs to get through.

This simplest explanation is that JKR isn’t a very good writer. She came up with an idea “I’ll give hard working and ambitious Hermione a time travel device so that she can take more classes in the same amount of time” without thinking deeply about the implications of allowing time travel to exist in the universe of Harry Potter.

House Elves were one of the things that made me realize that JK Rowling was something of a hack. I found it odd that Hermione was the first person in the wizarding world to ever point out that House Elves were slaves and were being treated very badly. In the thousands of years that wizards and wizard schools had existed, no one ever protested the treatment of House Elves? Not even the ‘Good Guys’? Everyone just accepted this over the centuries??

And then she does almost nothing with this potential plot point…

My father-in-law got a Master’s Degree in Computer Science 30 years ago. IIRC, it was heavy in C programming and involved typical CS fare like algorithms, pointers, sorting, data structures, etc. He was a high school math teacher at the time (he’s now retired). He took the classes mostly because he enjoyed learning.

I did ok during the Dos/Windows 95 era, but as time went on, he seemed less and less able to solve his own computer problems. He can’t even Google a problem effectively (or even remember to try to Google his problem).

Most recently, I had to hold his hand while he bought a new computer at Best Buy and then further hold his hand as he went through, step by step, the Windows 11 installation/first time start up process.

<sigh>

I’ve got Win 10 and it works fine. I have no reason to upgrade to Win 11. If any new ‘feature’ gets added to Win 10, I will disable it.

It does in my house.

If the US created it in the 1980s, how did a guy in the Congo catch it in 1959?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_early_HIV/AIDS_cases